Today’s Excellent Read: High Crimes and Misdemeanors

art credit: gallerycartoon.blogspot.com

Douglas MacKinnon at Investor’s Business Daily brings a lot of the dossier-DOJ-FBI-Russia-collusion-spy scandals into clearer focus, and it is not pretty. A few morsels:

As ever more deliberately concealed evidence is being uncovered of factual "collusion" between the Obama White House, the failed presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and Russia; of professional operatives in our intelligence services openly trying to first, cripple the campaign of Donald Trump, and then, having failed at that criminal objective, to delegitimize his presidency; and of secretly funded far-left anarchist groups proudly preaching violence against those they oppose, it seems the perfect time to ask three questions:

First, what is the definition of a "Police State?

Second, what is the definition of "Treason?"

And last, what – as defined in the Constitution of the United States of America – is the meaning of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors?"

. . .

When you collude with foreign espionage agents to manufacture evidence to obtain a warrant to spy on citizens of the United States for purely political and ideological reasons, you are not only breaking the laws of the United States, but are introducing those very questions of treason, bribery and high crimes and misdemeanors into the conversation.

. . .

What is happening now is not only chilling to the bone, it's dramatically more dangerous because these crimes are being aided, abetted and covered-up by a number of partisans in the mainstream media.

Read the rest here.

# # #

Amnesty vote in Congress ~ Alert!

UPDATE: 5:53pm (posted at 6:37 pm) from NumbersUSA media release:

NumbersUSA and its 9 million activists are pleased that the Senate rejected all three amnesty proposals that came to the floor today for a vote. Every proposal under consideration put the interests of illegal aliens and foreign citizens ahead of the interests of American workers, American communities, and national security. Americans can not afford for Congress to grant amnesty without immediately ending Chain Migration and the Visa Lottery and mandating E-Verify.

UPDATE: 4:32 pm from The Hill:

The Senate has rejected legislation based on President Trump's framework for an immigration deal in a 39-60 vote on Thursday, leaving an uncertain path forward for Congress with nearly a million immigrants sheltered by an Obama-era program face the prospect of deportation.

The measure spearheaded by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) needed 60 votes to clear a filibuster, but failed to meet the mark.

It was the fourth proposal in a row rejected by the Senate on Thursday afternoon, and it received the fewest votes of support. All three other measures won more than 50 votes.

UPDATE 3:10 pm from The Hill:

Senate rejects first bipartisan measure as immigration votes begin

The Senate has rejected an immigration measure sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Christopher Coons (D-Del.) that did not include money for President Trump’s border wall.

The proposal is the first of four that the Senate will vote on Thursday, though each appears short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
This Action Alert is from NumbersUSA [emphasis color in original]:

As [of] noon on Thursday, the Senate is considering not only granting amnesty to every illegal immigrant already in the country, but to any illegal immigrants who can get here by June!

Could anything express more contempt for American voters than this? Incredibly, this bill is rumored to have 65 supporters in the Senate; it already has EIGHT Republican co-sponsors!

The Senate is debating immigration proposals all day TODAY and through the end of this week. So far, it looks to be one horrible bill after the other. (One exception would be the amendment from Pennsylvania's Sen. Toomey, which directs actions against sanctuary cities.)

KEEP CHECKING YOUR EMAIL FOR ACTION ALERTS -- THE SITUATION IS CHANGING HOURLY! [NOTE: Or check this website for Updates.]

Our best hope may be that the Senate defeats ALL its current proposals. Then, if that happens, we will press hard to have the House take up the Goodlatte bill, H.R. 4760, that we've endorsed.

. . .

There is GOOD news on the House side. We've learned that House Republican leaders are doing a "whip count" on the Goodlatte bill. This is such great news, because this is the NumbersUSA-endorsed bill that mandates E-Verify for every employer, cancels chain migration, and eliminates the visa lottery.

A whip count means they will be more likely to bring the bill up for a vote if it seems to have enough support to pass. So, obviously we're now pouring lots more resources into the House fight as well as our Senate efforts.

. . . None of the Senate measures would prevent pressure for future amnesties by requiring all employers to use E-Verify or reduce the size of the amnesty by ending Chain Migration in the near term. Mandatory E-Verify and an immediate end to Chain Migration must be part of any DACA deal!

1) The Schumer-Collins-Rounds-King Proposal -- This is biggest threat, an amnesty to EVERY ILLEGAL ALIEN IN AMERICA, INCLUDING ALL THOSE WHO CAN SNEAK IN BY JUNE 30, while it guts interior enforcement! And it may actually have the most support.

2) The White House Proposal -- Sens. Chuck Grassley and John Cornyn have drafted legislation that reflects the White House DACA proposal. It would expand DACA to grant an immediate amnesty to approximately 1.8 million illegal aliens. It calls for a $25 billion trust fund to build the border wall and improve overall border security. It would eliminate the Visa Lottery and halt new applications for Chain Migration, but it uses those supposedly eliminated visas to bring in the backlog of more than 4 million foreigners, which could take 15-20 years.

3) Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) propose granting amnesty to 3.2 million illegal aliens without any concrete steps to reduce immigration or improve enforcement at all.

One piece of good news is that the White House publicly rejected the McCain-Coons approach yesterday. 

It's hard to see how most of these bills are a "compromise." . . .

Call Ohio Senators: 

Sen. Rob Portman --    (888) 995-2089

Sen. Sherrod Brown -- (888) 995-2018

 See a report by Ed Morrisey at Hot Air here.

# # #

Gun Free Zones

image credit: dreamstime.com

The headline today was horrible. 17 dead at the Florida school shooting. Here’s a follow-up from CrimeSearch: 

Another mass public shooting in Florida, another gun-free zone: Parkland, Florida school shooting

. . . When will there be a serious discussion of the dangers of gun-free zones?  When will the media point out in their discussions of the guns used or how the guns were obtained that another attack occurred in a gun-free zone?

After listening to Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) push for more gun control on Shepard Smith’s show on Fox News this afternoon, we decided to put up this post. . . .

[Re] mass public shootings in Florida where at least four people have been killed [were] all gun-free zones . . . where general citizens are banned from having guns. . . . 

After the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, I finally figured out that a gun-free zone was the least safe place to be. Note: Cleveland Tea Party does not take a position on guns per se, but one of our core values is "limited government." The Gun-Free School Zones Act (GFSZA) is an act of the U.S. Congress signed into law in 1990; less government can save lives. 

# # #

Ohio Governor candidates at CAIR event

Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media reported this (I did not find this story at Cleveland.com); O'Neil linked to Progress Ohio which categorized this event under “Progressive Organizations”:

On Sunday, three Democrats running in the Ohio governor's race, including former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, spoke at an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim group with ties to the terror organization Hamas and involved in a terror-funding scheme.

"Join CAIR-Columbus for a Governor Candidate Forum starting at 2:00 PM at the Dublin Community Recreation Center on Sunday Feb. 11th! Doors will open at 1:30," read an announcement at Progress Ohio.

The event included three candidates for governor: state Sen. Joe Schiavoni, former state Rep. Connie Pillich, and former Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Former Congresswoman Betty Sutton represented former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. Sutton is his running-mate.

CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror-funding case by the Justice Department. CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to radical Islamist terror.

It is still early in the race, but Cordray holds an early lead. In a January poll conducted by Fallon Research, Cordray, who recently resigned as head of the Consumer Products Safety Commission, led with 23 percent, and Kucinich took second place with 16 percent. Schiavoni took four percent, and Pillich two percent. Bill O'Neill, former justice of the Ohio Supreme Court who recently resigned to run for governor, took three percent. A whopping 52 percent remained undecided.

. . .

Full report is here (h/t Stephen Green at Instapundit).

# # #

About the 2-year budget compromise

image credit: foxbusiness.com

About the 2-year budget compromise now signed by President Trump

From Guy Benson’s “Analysis: Let's Face It, Neither of These Awful Parties is Actually Serious About Fiscal Responsibility” at Townhall:

The biggest problem with the compromise is that abandons all pretense of fiscal restraint, and virtually guarantees more harmful and irresponsible can-kicking.  The GOP-led Congress has agreed to a two-year plan that will add $1.5 trillion to deficits over a decade, establishing a higher baseline from which "cuts" will be opposed, and on which additional spending will be built.  And Republicans have done so while surrendering a powerful mechanism (reconciliation) that allows them to pass budget policies without requiring the help of tax-and-spend Democrats (as they did on tax reform). 

Benson’s full article is here. Charles Hurt at Breitbart didn’t think much of it either:

Any time you hear Washington talk about bipartisan agreement, America, grab your wallet and run!

Once again, lawmakers in Washington have finally cut through all the thorny brambles of partisanship and discovered (yet again! yippie!) something they can all agree upon: spending scads and scads more of other people’s money that we don’t even have!

Support for military expenditures was a key talking point for Congress critters like Sean Duffy, who voted "yes." 

It’s still out-of-control spending. And back to Benson:

Here's what bothers me: Republicans didn't even really try.  They could have attempted a full-court press explaining the need for increased military funding, while arguing that in an era of $4 trillion in annual federal spending (up from less than $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2000, just for some perspective), breaking caps on domestic spending is unnecessary.  Or they could have demanded that in exchange for some heightened domestic spending for discrete priorities, Democrats would have to agree to some modest and mathematically-essential entitlement reforms. 

Instead, we got this [via The Washington Examiner]:

In 2017, for the first time in the post-Tea Party era, Republicans finally gained unified control of government. They spent months blundering on healthcare, and ultimately reneged on their eight-year promise to repeal Obamacare. They have now agreed on a deal with Democrats that would blow up the spending caps that were a legacy of the Tea Party movement — to the tune of $300 billion over the next two years...The agreement would boost military spending by $165 billion above the 2011 caps and nonmilitary spending by $131 billion; it boosts emergency disaster relief spending by $90 billion (remember when the Tea Party Republicans believed emergency spending needed to be offset?); provides $6 billion in more money to fight opioid addiction; has $20 billion in infrastructure funding; it provides more funding for community health centers; and it repeals the Independent Payment Advisory Board, one of Obamacare’s cost-containment initiatives, without any significant alternative ideas to curb Medicare spending. Now, let’s get one thing clear. It's possible to rein in long-term debt while keeping taxes relatively low and military spending relatively high, but only if those policies are met with a dramatic strategy to restrain entitlements and other non-defense spending. But that’s not what Republicans are doing.

I had hoped for better. Reminder to self: the GOPe are members in good standing of the Uniparty.

# # #

Long Live the Tea Party

dontgive-uptheship-blog-blog.tumblr.com

I don’t usually agree with Rick Moran, who posts at PJ Media. But his piece “The Tea Party Is Dead, Long Live the Tea Party” was linked on Instapundit, and it had a few good thoughts, going back to the inception of the Tea Party groups in 2009:

But the tea party's real value to the country is that for the first time since the ratification debates over the Constitution, millions of people across the country were actually reading and discussing our founding document.

These weren't constitutional scholars sitting around some Ivy League lecture hall esoterically discussing the foundations of America. These were millions of ordinary people sitting at kitchen tables, in small church meeting rooms, on front porches and backyards probing the reasons America came into existence.

. . . What mattered was that ordinary people had taken a keen interest in preserving the spirit of the Constitution and the essence of our founding principles that are "self-evident" in that document at a time it has been under relentless attack.

. . .

This side of the tea parties was never widely reported on by the media, for very good reasons. The left hates getting into a discussion about what the Constitution says because they can't defend most of their ideas. Despite the fact that the founders wrote the Constitution so that basically anyone who could read could understand it, the left keeps insisting the Constitution says things that it doesn't.

Any clever lawyer or willing judge can twist the meaning of the Constitution so that it says anything they want it to say to accomplish any end they wish to accomplish. So the budget deal may have killed fiscal sanity in Washington and -- perhaps -- the tea party's political power to some extent. And the GOP may have co-opted most of the larger tea party groups to do the party's bidding.

What remains of the tea party is, to my mind, the best part. The desire of ordinary people to govern themselves, to take personal responsibility for their own lives, and to try to do something about the denigration and increasing irrelevance of the Constitution.

As Glenn Reynolds concluded: Don’t give up the ship.

# # #

Falcon Heavy rocket boosters perfect landing

YouTube 

INSANE! SpaceX Falcon Heavy Side Boosters Landing Simultaneously at Kennedy Space Center

Off topic, but just "awesome." The Falcon Heavy SpaceX test launch earlier this week was as astonishing to watch as was Neil Armstrong taking his first step on the Moon. And Elon Musk put a Tesla inside the rocket as payload. Nice touch. 

But it was the booster rockets that disconnected from the main rocket and guided themselves back to earth, hitting their landing pads perfectly - sort of like pencils landing directly on their erasers. The split screens show the booster coming down to Earth feet-first, as it were, and the cameras on the boosters themselves let you watch the landing pads come into focus as the boosters approach their target. I've never seen anything like it. 

# # #